B1 · Intermediate
13 min
sciencenatural disastersgeopoliticspoverty
La Tierra que Tiembla: Por Qué Afganistán No Puede Escapar de los Terremotos
The Shaking Earth: Why Afghanistan Cannot Escape Earthquakes
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Intermediate level — perfect for intermediate learners expanding their range.
So, buried in this week's news under all the war coverage, there was an earthquake.
Magnitude 5.8, hit Afghanistan and Pakistan, eight people killed in Kabul.
And I want to talk about it, because I think it gets lost.
Bueno, mira, es que Afganistán tiene dos problemas muy grandes al mismo tiempo: la guerra y los terremotos.
Well, look, the thing is Afghanistan has two very big problems at the same time: war and earthquakes.
Y la gente solo habla de la guerra.
And people only talk about the war.
Right.
And the thing is, these aren't random events.
Afghanistan is one of the most seismically active places on earth.
There's a reason for that, and it goes back hundreds of millions of years.
Sí, exacto.
Yes, exactly.
La verdad es que Afganistán está en un lugar muy especial en el mapa geológico.
The truth is that Afghanistan sits in a very special place on the geological map.
Dos placas tectónicas enormes se encuentran allí.
Two enormous tectonic plates meet there.
Let's start there, because this is the foundation of everything.
The Indian plate, the massive piece of crust that carries India, is moving north.
It's been moving north for about fifty million years, and it's crashing, very slowly, into the Eurasian plate.
Y cuando dos placas chocan así, la tierra no puede quedarse quieta.
And when two plates collide like that, the earth cannot stay still.
Las montañas más altas del mundo, el Himalaya, existen porque estas dos placas todavía empujan la una contra la otra.
The highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas, exist because these two plates are still pushing against each other.
And Afghanistan sits right in the middle of that collision zone.
The Hindu Kush mountain range, which runs across northeastern Afghanistan, is basically the buckled edge of that ancient crash.
It's still moving.
Even now.
A ver, cuando digo que todavía se mueve, la gente piensa: ¿cuánto?
Now, when I say it's still moving, people think: how much?
Bueno, más o menos cuatro o cinco centímetros cada año.
Well, roughly four or five centimeters every year.
No es mucho, pero en millones de años es una cantidad enorme.
Not much, but over millions of years it's an enormous amount.
Here's what gets me: four centimeters a year sounds like nothing.
But that's constant stress building up in the rock.
And when that stress releases, it releases all at once.
That's an earthquake.
Es que es como doblar un papel.
It's like folding a piece of paper.
Puedes doblar, doblar, doblar...
You can fold, fold, fold, and suddenly the paper breaks.
y de repente el papel se rompe.
Rock is the same.
La roca es igual.
It builds up tension for years, decades, centuries, and then, one day, it breaks.
Acumula tensión durante años, décadas, siglos, y después, un día, se rompe.
I spent time in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, doing reporting.
And I remember being struck by how the landscape looked almost violent, geologically.
The mountains there don't look old and rounded.
They look sharp, recent.
Sí, porque son relativamente nuevas, en términos geológicos.
Yes, because they are relatively young, in geological terms.
El Himalaya y el Hindu Kush son montañas jóvenes.
The Himalayas and the Hindu Kush are young mountains.
Las montañas más viejas del mundo, como las de Escandinavia, son mucho más suaves.
The oldest mountains in the world, like those in Scandinavia, are much smoother.
Now, 5.8 on the Richter scale, or more precisely the moment magnitude scale as scientists now prefer.
That's not a catastrophic earthquake in absolute terms.
A 7.0 releases about a thousand times more energy than a 5.8.
So what makes this one deadly?
Bueno, esa es la pregunta más importante.
Well, that's the most important question.
La verdad es que el número en la escala no es lo que mata a las personas.
The truth is that the number on the scale is not what kills people.
Lo que mata a las personas son los edificios.
What kills people is the buildings.
Say more about that, because I think this is something people don't fully appreciate.
Mira, en Japón, un terremoto de 6.0 causa muy pocos muertos porque los edificios son muy resistentes.
Look, in Japan, a 6.0 earthquake causes very few deaths because the buildings are very resistant.
En Afganistán o en Turquía, el mismo terremoto puede matar a cientos de personas porque las construcciones son más débiles.
In Afghanistan or Turkey, the same earthquake can kill hundreds of people because the constructions are weaker.
The extraordinary thing is that seismologists have a phrase for this: they say earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do.
And when you look at the data, it's brutal.
The 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, 6.7 magnitude, killed 57 people.
The 2003 Bam earthquake in Iran, 6.6, killed 26,000.
Veintiseis mil personas.
Twenty-six thousand people.
Es que es imposible imaginar eso.
It's impossible to imagine that.
Y la diferencia entre los dos terremotos no fue la magnitud, fue la riqueza del país y la calidad de los edificios.
And the difference between the two earthquakes was not the magnitude, it was the wealth of the country and the quality of the buildings.
Afghanistan has been in near-continuous conflict since 1978.
That's close to fifty years.
Infrastructure investment, building codes, engineering education, all of it has been hollowed out.
The buildings in Kabul are often constructed with mud brick or poor quality concrete, no rebar, no seismic engineering.
La verdad es que esto no es solo un problema de Afganistán.
The truth is that this is not just an Afghanistan problem.
En muchas partes del mundo, la gente construye casas con materiales baratos porque no tiene otra opción.
In many parts of the world, people build houses with cheap materials because they have no other choice.
No es ignorancia, es pobreza.
It's not ignorance, it's poverty.
Look, I've seen this pattern in a lot of places I covered.
It's a compounding vulnerability.
You're poor, so you can't afford good construction.
You're poor, so you live in a densely packed urban area.
And you're in a seismically active region because historically, those valleys and mountain corridors were where people settled.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y Afganistán tiene una historia muy trágica con los terremotos.
And Afghanistan has a very tragic history with earthquakes.
En 1998, un terremoto en la región de Takhar mató a más de cuatro mil personas.
In 1998, an earthquake in the Takhar region killed more than four thousand people.
En 2022, otro terremoto en Khost y Paktika mató a más de mil.
In 2022, another earthquake in Khost and Paktika killed more than a thousand.
The 2022 Khost earthquake, I remember that.
It struck at three in the morning local time, when everyone was asleep inside their homes.
That's when these events become massacres, not just disasters.
Sí, el momento del día es muy importante.
Yes, the time of day is very important.
Un terremoto a las tres de la mañana es mucho más peligroso que uno al mediodía, cuando la gente está fuera de los edificios.
An earthquake at three in the morning is much more dangerous than one at noon, when people are outside the buildings.
So here's a question I want to push on, the one every science journalist eventually asks: can we predict earthquakes?
Because after covering a few of these disasters, I kept wondering why we can predict hurricanes days in advance but we can't give people twenty-four hours warning for an earthquake.
Bueno, mira, la respuesta corta es: no, todavía no podemos predecir terremotos.
Well, look, the short answer is: no, we still cannot predict earthquakes.
Los científicos pueden decir que una zona es peligrosa, pero no pueden decir cuándo exactamente va a ocurrir el terremoto.
Scientists can say that a zone is dangerous, but they cannot say exactly when the earthquake is going to happen.
Which is astonishing when you think about how much seismology has advanced.
We can map faults with incredible precision.
We know exactly where the stress is building.
We just don't know when the rock will finally let go.
Es que la tierra es muy compleja.
The thing is the earth is very complex.
Los científicos estudian pequeños movimientos del suelo, los niveles del agua subterránea, la actividad de los animales...
Scientists study small movements of the ground, underground water levels, animal behavior, but no method is reliable yet.
pero ningún método es confiable todavía.
I mean, Japan has the most sophisticated early warning system in the world.
But even that doesn't predict earthquakes.
It detects the initial P-wave, the faster, less destructive wave, and sends an alert before the S-wave, the destructive one, arrives.
You get maybe ten, twenty seconds.
Diez o veinte segundos parece poco, pero es suficiente para que los trenes paren, los hospitales protejan a los pacientes, y la gente se esconde debajo de una mesa.
Ten or twenty seconds seems like little, but it's enough for trains to stop, hospitals to protect patients, and people to hide under a table.
En Japón, esos segundos salvan vidas.
In Japan, those seconds save lives.
Afghanistan has none of that infrastructure.
No early warning system, no national seismic monitoring network worth speaking of, no emergency response architecture.
When the ground moves, people are entirely on their own.
A ver, y esto es importante: cuando los talibanes tomaron el control en 2021, muchas organizaciones internacionales salieron del país.
Now, and this is important: when the Taliban took control in 2021, many international organizations left the country.
Eso incluía organizaciones que ayudaban con la gestión de desastres.
That included organizations that helped with disaster management.
The extraordinary thing is you've got a situation where geophysics doesn't care about politics.
The plates keep moving regardless of who's in charge in Kabul.
The seismic risk is exactly the same under the Taliban as it was under any previous government.
The capacity to respond is not.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y en la zona del Hindu Kush, los terremotos son especialmente peligrosos porque muchos ocurren muy profundo bajo la tierra, a doscientos o trescientos kilómetros de profundidad.
And in the Hindu Kush zone, earthquakes are especially dangerous because many occur very deep beneath the earth, at two hundred or three hundred kilometers depth.
Deep-focus earthquakes.
Which is actually a fascinating quirk of the Hindu Kush zone.
Most earthquakes happen in the top thirty kilometers of the crust.
But this region has this phenomenon called the Hindu Kush seismic zone, where you get earthquakes at extraordinary depths, sometimes down to three hundred kilometers.
Y cuando un terremoto es muy profundo, las ondas viajan más lejos.
And when an earthquake is very deep, the waves travel further.
Un terremoto profundo en el Hindu Kush puede sentirse en India, en Pakistán, en Irán, incluso en partes de Asia Central.
A deep earthquake in the Hindu Kush can be felt in India, in Pakistan, in Iran, even in parts of Central Asia.
So the science here is genuinely strange.
Normally at three hundred kilometers deep, the rock should be too hot and plastic to store the kind of elastic energy that produces an earthquake.
Scientists spent decades arguing about how those deep Hindu Kush earthquakes were even physically possible.
La verdad es que la explicación más aceptada ahora es que la placa india se dobla hacia abajo en algunos lugares y el material frío de la superficie baja con ella.
The truth is that the most accepted explanation now is that the Indian plate bends downward in some places, and the cold material from the surface goes down with it.
Ese material frío puede todavía fracturarse, incluso a gran profundidad.
That cold material can still fracture, even at great depth.
Right, so.
The big picture question.
Afghanistan is going to keep shaking.
The geology is not going to change.
What does that mean for a country that is also at war, that is also facing a humanitarian crisis, that is also internationally isolated?
Bueno, significa que el riesgo es enorme.
Well, it means the risk is enormous.
Kabul, la capital, creció muy rápidamente en los últimos treinta años.
Kabul, the capital, grew very rapidly in the last thirty years.
Antes tenía un millón de habitantes, ahora tiene más de cuatro millones.
Before it had one million inhabitants, now it has more than four million.
Y muchos de esos edificios nuevos no son seguros.
And many of those new buildings are not safe.
There's a term urban seismic risk, and Kabul is one of the most extreme cases in the world.
The combination of a massive, rapidly growing city, poor construction, high seismicity, and zero emergency infrastructure.
If a major earthquake, say a 7.0 or above, struck directly under Kabul, the casualties could be catastrophic.
Es que la historia nos enseña esto.
The thing is history teaches us this.
En 1976, un terremoto en Guatemala mató a veintitrés mil personas.
In 1976, an earthquake in Guatemala killed twenty-three thousand people.
Los periodistas llamaron a ese terremoto 'el terremoto de los pobres' porque destruyó los barrios pobres y los barrios ricos sobrevivieron.
Journalists called that earthquake 'the earthquake of the poor' because it destroyed the poor neighborhoods while the wealthy neighborhoods survived.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
And it's a pattern you see over and over.
Haiti 2010, two hundred thousand dead.
Chile 2010, same year, similar magnitude, five hundred dead.
Chile had building codes.
Haiti had nothing.
Y eso es lo que hace que este tema sea tan importante.
And that is what makes this topic so important.
Hablar de terremotos es hablar de ciencia, sí, pero también es hablar de dinero, de política, de justicia.
Talking about earthquakes is talking about science, yes, but it is also talking about money, politics, and justice.
La vulnerabilidad sísmica no es natural.
Seismic vulnerability is not natural.
Es una decisión.
It is a decision.
That's a good place to end on, actually.
The science of earthquakes is magnificent and humbling.
The Indian plate has been moving for fifty million years and it will keep moving long after every government and every war has been forgotten.
But what we do with that knowledge, how we build, how we prepare, how we protect people, that part is entirely up to us.
Exacto.
Exactly.
La tierra siempre va a temblar.
The earth will always shake.
La pregunta es si las personas están preparadas.
The question is whether people are prepared.
Y en Afganistán, en este momento, la respuesta es muy triste.
And in Afghanistan, right now, the answer is very sad.